A fan of the 2001 GameCube game Wave Race: Blue Storm found a long-buried Easter egg in the racing game this week.

The code, posted to the NeoGAF message board by user “Raoul Duke,” unlocks a sardonic commentary track that insults the player at every move. “You don’t have an inferiority complex,” the announcer quips. “You’re just inferior.”

The code seems “pretty elaborate,” says Chris Bieniek, editor of Tips & Tricks Codebook magazine. “It’s separate from the password entry system that ..read the full article

Nintendo will re-release its 1993 Super Nintendo game Super Mario All-Stars on Wii in Japan to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the series, according to reports.

A news leak from a retail event in Japan, reported by the indispensable Andriasang, says that Nintendo will release a Wii disc containing the SNES game for 2,500 yen (about $30) that comes packaged with a Mario history book and a soundtrack CD featuring music from games spanning the entire history of the series. Nintendo ..read the full article

Final Fantasy XIV. Image courtesy Square Enix

Square Enix will commence open beta testing of Final Fantasy XIV at 7 p.m. Pacific time Wednesday.

The beta test of the new MMO was meant to begin on Tuesday, but was postponed when the Japanese gamemaker discovered “critical” bugs in the code.

Final Fantasy XIV, due out September 30 on PC and in March 2011 for PlayStation 3, is the company’s first foray into the MMO space since it launched Final Fantasy XI in ..read the full article

Christopher Lloyd will reprise his role as Dr. Emmet Lathrop “Doc” Brown in the Back to the Future videogame, publisher Telltale Games said Wednesday.

This will be the first time the actor has portrayed the harried inventor of time travel since Universal Studios launched Back to the Future: The Ride in 1991.

Telltale announced its intention to revive the classic 80’s films as a videogame series earlier this year. Through a licensing agreement with Universal Studios, the maker of contemporary adventure ..read the full article

Case Zero, a downloadable game for Xbox 360, gives players a few hours' worth of the zombie beatdowns that the full Dead Rising 2 game will feature in September.Image courtesy Capcom

Let’s not mince words. Dead Rising 2: Case Zero is a demo that costs five bucks. It’s still worth it.

The idea of paying real money for a hands-on preview of a game might be a bitter pill for frugal gamers. But Case Zero, an exclusive prequel chapter to Capcom’s ..read the full article

Fantasy University, a new Facebook game, uses parodic characters with classic role-playing game mechanics to draw in gamers that want more complexity than FarmVille.Image courtesy Simutronics

Though Facebook games have a reputation for being addictive, they’re also seen as far too simple to satisfy the serious gamer. David Whatley, president and CEO of Simutronics, hopes that his company’s new game will live up to the rigorous standards of the hard-core.

Fantasy University, a parody-driven role-playing game that riffs on pop ..read the full article

Hudson will donate 10 cents for every Facebook user that clicks the “Like” button on its forthcoming game Lost In Shadow.

Child’s Play is a pet charity of the videogame set. The organization, founded by Penny Arcade cartoonists Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, raises cash for children’s hospitals, providing toys, games, books and movies to sick kids. It’s not uncommon for game companies to tie Child’s Play fundraisers to promotions for their new games.

Here, Hudson is piggybacking its good deed ..read the full article

Disney Interactive Studios unveiled the collector’s edition of Tron: Evolution on Monday.

The high-end package, slated to come out on December 7 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, will include an exclusive Tron light cycle model crafted by Sideshow Collectibles.

The special edition retails for $130 and comes with a plastic display case for the light cycle, which has a drawer underneath for storing your game.

Tron: Evolution bridges the plot between the original Tron movie and the new flick ..read the full article

Microsoft will increase the price of a subscription to its Xbox Live online gaming service later this year, it said Monday.

Via the Major Nelson blog, the Xbox 360 maker announced that a one-year Xbox Live account will now cost $60 instead of $50 effective November 1.

The prices of one- and six-month subscriptions will also increase, as will certain subscription plans in Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom.

The fee increase comes as “no surprise” to Electronic Entertainment Design and Research analyst ..read the full article

Nintendo will lower the prices of its DSi line of portable game hardware next month, it said Monday.

The company’s Nintendo DSi will be lowered from $170 to $150 and the DSi XL will go from $190 to $170 starting on September 12, the launch day of Professor Layton and the Unwound Future.

The low-end DS Lite hardware will remain at $130, the price point at which it was launched in June 2006.

In July, Nintendo said it lost $289 million in its ..read the full article

The next expansion to the Wild West shooter Red Dead Redemption will let players gamble against each other.Image courtesy Rockstar

Rockstar will release the next downloadable expansion for its PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game Red Dead Redemption on September 21, the publisher said Friday.

The “Liars and Cheats Pack” will include multiplayer poker, liar’s dice and horse races. Players will also get a new rifle, seven new gang hideouts to attack, four new hunting grounds and new modes, scoring and ..read the full article

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Metroid: Other M is the exact kind of game Nintendo said it wasn’t making anymore.

Sometime during the last generation of game consoles, everybody decided that action games had to be big cinematic to-dos stuffed with lengthy movie sequences, Hollywood actors and epic storylines. Everybody except Nintendo, that is, who said “No thanks, we’ll just make Wii Sports forever” and made sure that its flagship ..read the full article

Used games stacked deep at an Xtra-Vision store in Ireland. Photo: Cian Ginty/Flickr

Debates over used games aren’t entirely about used games, just an uncertain industry looking for an easy villain.

The old back-and-forth over used game sales got kicked off again this week thanks to these comments from THQ creative director Cory Ledesma, per the company’s introduction of a one-time use code for online gameplay in its World Wrestling Entertainment games:

I don’t think we really care whether used game buyers ..read the full article

Chiptune artist Moldilox released a pair of songs last month for a videogame that never existed.

The two tunes, composed with the program MilkyTracker, are meant to be lost songs from the soundtrack to a NES game called Fourteen — a cart based on a bizarre manga of the same name by Kazuo Umezu.

The manga does indeed exist. Sadly, we are not fortunate enough to live in a universe where there was an 8-bit videogame that told the story of ..read the full article

Penny Arcade awarded a $10,000 scholarship to Jeffrey Lin, a PhD student from the University of Washington on Tuesday.

Lin wowed the scholarship judges with his plans to study how vision scientists can contribute to the field of game design. Prior to his win Lin was already hard at work studying visual cognition in video game players.

“Vision scientists have the tools and skills to help developers tackle problems from how to reduce motion sickness some experience in FPS titles to how ..read the full article

Wheatley guides the player through GLaDOS's murderous assembly line.

Valve released new footage from Portal 2 yesterday.

The clip (embedded below) features the debut of actor Stephen Merchant as Wheatley — a quirky A.I. that aids the player in their return to the Aperture Science complex. Wheatley was unveiled at E3 this June and was temporarily voiced by Valve animator Richard Lord.

If the video is any indication Portal 2 appears to stray much further from the Aperture Science test labs ..read the full article

“My goal is that people who work here love it here and talk about it,” says Klei Entertainment's Jamie Cheng.Photo courtesy Jamie Cheng

To the outside world, Jamie Cheng appeared to be working his dream job.

It was 2005, and Cheng was an AI programmer at Relic, a game design studio based in Vancouver, British Columbia, that had just been acquired by superpublisher THQ. Cheng had designed the artificial intelligence for strategy game Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, which had become ..read the full article

The videogame Portal is required reading for some Wabash College freshmen this year.

Michael Abbott, a teacher at the liberal arts college in Indiana, explained Friday how Valve’s first-person puzzler wound up on a reading list alongside work by Aristotle and Shakespeare.

Earlier in the year, Abbott found himself on a committee to create the curriculum for a mandatory freshman seminar called “Enduring Questions” –a class that seeks to encourage students to engage “fundamental questions of humanity” using works old and ..read the full article